The Story Behind The Story:
Kathi Appelt on
ALLEY CATS' MEOW

THE ALLEY CATS' MEOW by Kathi Appelt, illustrated by Jon Goodell (Harcourt,
2002). This jazzy tale (or is that tails?) features the love story of
Red and Ginger. The text sings and the illustrations dance. Really, jazzy.
Age 4-up. This interview was conducted via email in 2002. Visit author Kathi Appelt,
and read An
Interview With Kathi Appelt.

What was your initial inspiration for creating this book?

Paws down, cats are my favorite animal! I've never lived
without a cat, and I can't imagine life without them. Anyway, for a couple
of years, both of my sons took tap dancing lessons, and one day this group
from Australia called the Tap Dogs came to Houston to perform. So a bunch
of us got tickets and drove down to watch them. What a show! Great dancing,
great performance, and best of all . . . great name. I just loved the name,
and I thought, "Well, if there are tap dogs, maybe I could have a book that
had jazz cats."

At about the same time, there was a band called Squirrel
Nut Zippers that was doing a lot of original swing music, and hearing them
brought to mind all the old swing tunes that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
used to dance to back in the movies of the 50's and 60's. And so there you
go . . .

What was the timeline between spark and publication, and
what were the major events along the way?

I wrote this one fairly quickly, mainly because a friend
of mine invited me to come stay with her for several days at her cabin in
Tennessee. She and I took our laptops and spent five days just writing.
There was no TV, no interruptions, just the two of us writing. This book
really kept me from being bored out of my mind! So, I came home with a fairly
well-polished manuscript, sent it to Allyn Johnston and she bought it.

What were the challenges (literary, research, psychological,
logistical) in bringing it to life?

Okay, so Allyn bought it, and I'm feeling really smug.
Then I had to completely rewrite it. There were a lot of problems with the
rhyme, and also I had included a whole host of other cats--Ella Fitzgrowler,
Frank Furrnatra, Cab Calico, etc--and they were bogging down the story.
Allyn pushed me to turn the story over to Red and Ginger and take the other
cats out of there. The story is much cleaner thanks to her, and I'm a humbler
person.

The biggest challenge was finding the right illustrator.
Allyn insisted upon finding someone who could handle the dark night scenes
well, and that was tricky. Almost by accident, I saw a cover that Jon Goodell
had done for a book by Dick King-Smith. I clipped it and sent it to Allyn
and, thank you God, Jon took the project. We're now doing a second book
together, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MERRY CROW, and I can't wait to see what Jon's
crow is going to look like. I absolutely adore his cats--they're la-di-da-di-da!